National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology & Science

Empowering Educators to Recruit and Retain Women in STEM and Career Technical Education

Donna Milgram has been the Principal Investigator of 5 National Science Foundation grants. She has worked intensively with schools—boots on the ground—to develop the strategies and system that help educators enroll up to 25-50% female students in STEM/CTE classes.

Donna's NSF-funded CalWomenTech Project was highlighted by the National Science Foundation for demonstrating significant achievement and program effectiveness and chosen as 1 of 3 model projects by the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

After over 30 years of service in the field, she has "cracked the code" and developed an 8 point system for recruitment and a 12 point system for retention that provides numerical results in about one year—not just the hope of eventual change 5-10 years down the road that nobody can measure.

She has developed recruitment and retention plan templates based on her proven system that requires you to use the plan elements which have resulted in success for so many of our past WomenTech Educators Training participants. She has even created templated personal encouragement and welcoming conversation guides.

Donna knows busy educators don't have time to figure this out all by themselves. That's why she developed rich supplementary online resources that range from examples of women in STEM/CTE recruitment videos, to a tested NSF-based spatial reasoning curricula that improves retention.

She loves being able to make such a big impact on STEM/CTE classrooms around the country, and in turn on the lives of women and girls who have the opportunity to reach their full potential.